FILM REVIEW Non-Stop

HANDS UP Liam Neeson stars in the action thriller ‘Non-Stop’.

The last action hero


Cinema
Daniel Carey

WALKING up McHale Road in Castlebar one evening last week, I heard a woman shouting ‘honey bunny’, a phrase that will forever in my mind be associated with Amanda Plummer in ‘Pulp Fiction’.
It’s only during the epilogue of Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 movie that we learn the real name of Plummer’s character (Yolanda), who has decided to rob a restaurant with her boyfriend, Ringo (Tim Roth). ‘Honey Bunny’ is the pet name by which he addresses her, and she in turn calls him ‘Pumpkin’.
At no stage in ‘Non-Stop’, the new action thriller starring Liam Neeson, does anybody stand up and shout (as Roth did in that diner): “Alright, everybody be cool, this is a robbery!” But then, it’s a whodunnit whose biggest let-down is its final act.
There’s actually a lot to like about the picture, which is directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, the Spaniard who also oversaw ‘Orphan’ and the Neeson vehicle ‘Unknown’. It’s big dumb fun, of course, but starts off intriguingly and, lit up by a fine lead performance, manages to hold the audience’s attention until it takes a nose dive late on.
Neeson plays Bill Marks, a US air marshal on a transatlantic flight who receives a series of cryptic text messages from somebody threatening to kill a passenger every 20 minutes unless he gets $150 million. Unlike restaurants, airlines are used to taking security precautions, but the filmmakers play around with well-trodden territory in an interesting way. The origin of this threat – delivered at 40,000 feet – remains a secret. So will Liam do his ‘Taken’ thing – find and kill whoever’s responsible?
A nervous flyer, Bill finds himself seated next to the sympathetic Jen (Julianne Moore) for the six-hour journey to London. After the first messages arrive, a decent number of twists keeps the narrative rumbling nicely. Bill looks for people playing with their phones. There are drugs on board. The account is in his name. He must surrender his gun to the pilot. Throw in a bomb and the passengers watching live TV coverage of the growing crisis, and ‘Non-Stop’ certainly can’t be accused of being boring.
Neeson brings his usual gravitas to the role, manhandles suspect after suspect, and gets to use an oxygen mask as a weapon. Michelle Dockery (from ‘Downton Abbey’) turns up as an air hostess, as does Lupita Nyong’o, but those keen on seeing what the Kenyan Academy Award winner did after ‘12 Years A Slave’ may be disappointed by how small her part is.
The well-publicised trailer has been using the tag line ‘146 passengers, 146 suspects’, though it seems unfair to include a little girl travelling alone in that number. But for a while at least, what each character does makes a sort of twisted sense. An NYPD officer fears shades of 9/11. An Asian doctor finds his loyalties switching as new information comes to light. There’s a rare moment of a humour as the little girl, offered a ‘magic’ ribbon, asks: “Are you bribing me?” There’s some decent effects late on – a shot of a careering trolley is the first of three memorable moments crammed into a short window.
Around about the time Bill offers everyone on board one year’s free international travel, things start to unravel. But I was willing to give ‘Non-Stop’ the benefit of the doubt up to the reveal which, at least on first viewing, was a big let-down. As the plot crash-landed, one was left thinking of spoofs like ‘Airplane!’ Like aeroplanes, films can’t just run out of fuel.